"I thought Dona Alicia was exaggerating when she told me how big your dog is," Garcia-Romero said.
"And what did Dona Alicia tell you about me?" Svetlana asked.
"That Carlitos had brought a girl to the Double-Bar-C Ranch she really hoped would be the one with whom he would finally settle down and start a family."
"That"s the plan," Svetlana said.
"And that"s about all she told me," Garcia-Romero said.
"Hector," Pevsner said, "Svetlana and I are cousins."
"And this gentleman?" Garcia-Romero asked, indicating Tom Barlow.
"Dmitri and Svetlana are brother and sister," Pevsner said.
"And Carlitos fits in how?"
"We think of him as family," Pevsner said.
"He is is family," Svetlana corrected him. family," Svetlana corrected him.
"And I have always thought of Carlitos and his cousin Fernando as my nephews," Garcia-Romero said.
"So, in a manner of speaking," Pevsner said, "we"re all family."
"Above the sound of the violins softly playing "Ave Maria,"" Castillo said, "I keep hearing a soft voice asking, "Charley, who the h.e.l.l do these two think they"re fooling?""
"Excuse me?" Garcia-Romero asked.
"You heard me, Hector," Castillo said. "How come I never saw you surrounded by thugs with Uzis before?"
"They"re necessary security, Carlos," Garcia-Romero said.
"To protect you from whom?"
"You"re a Mexican, a Mexican-American. You know there"s a criminal element here."
"I"m a Texican, and you G.o.dd.a.m.ned well know the difference between a Mexican-American and a Texican."
Garcia-Romero did not answer.
"I saw surveillance cameras in that cave downstairs," Castillo said. "What I want from you now, Tio Hector, right now right now, is to see the tapes of the Tupolev Tu-934A when it was here."
He could see in Garcia-Romero"s eyes that that had struck a chord.
"The what?" Garcia-Romero asked.
"The Russian airplane," Castillo qualified. "And please don"t tell me you don"t know what I"m talking about. I"ve had about all the bulls.h.i.t I can take."
Garcia-Romero looked at Castillo and then at Pevsner.
"You know about that? Is that why you"re here?"
"Why don"t you show us the tapes, Hector?" Pevsner replied.
"I was going to show them to you anyway," Garcia-Romero said.
"Mommy, I was only trying to see how many cookies were in the jar. That"s the only reason I had my hand in it. I wasn"t going to eat any of them. And that"s the truth."
"Let"s go, Hector," Castillo said. "Where are they?"
"In the security office," Garcia-Romero said. "It"s on the upper floor."
He gestured toward the center of the building, and then led everybody out of the great room into the foyer, and then up a wide, tiled stairway to an upper floor.
The security room was at the end of a corridor to the right.
Garcia-Romero didn"t even try to work the handle, instead pulling down the cover of a keypad and then punching in a code. And even then he didn"t try to open the door.
"I wondered what kind of an airplane that was," he said. "I"d never seen one before."
There was the sound of a bolt being drawn, and then the door was opened by a man in khakis. He had a pistol in a shoulder holster.
"We want to see the tapes of that strange airplane," Garcia-Romero said.
"Shall I bring them to the great room, Don Hector?"
"No," Castillo said. "We"ll look at them here."
The man looked at Castillo in surprise, and then at Garcia-Romero for guidance.
Garcia-Romero courteously waved Svetlana ahead of him through the door, and then motioned for the others to follow.
Inside, there was a desk and chairs and a cot, and another door. That was opened only after another punching of a keypad-this one mounted in sight beside the door-and the sliding of another bolt.
Inside the interior room there was a wall holding more than a dozen monitors. A man sat at a table watching them. There was room and chairs for two more people at the table.
Castillo looked at the monitors. He was not surprised to see that it was a first-cla.s.s installation, which covered just about everything in and around the house, the "airfield," and the cave. And he was pleased to see a battery of recorders; that meant that whatever had happened when the Tupolev Tu-934A had been at Drug Cartel International had been recorded and would be available.
"We want to see whatever the cameras picked up when that strange airplane was here," Garcia-Romero said. "So I suspect we had better start with the arrival of the cars from the Russian emba.s.sy."
The man who had opened the door for them went to a rack, quickly found what he was looking for, and inserted it into a slot of the desk.
"It will be on Monitor Fourteen, Don Hector," he said.
"What cars from the Russian emba.s.sy?" Pevsner demanded a split second before Castillo had finished opening his mouth to ask the same thing.
"There were three," Garcia-Romero said, "two Ford sport-"
He stopped and pointed to Monitor Fourteen.
The monitor showed two enormous black Ford Expeditions and a Mercedes sedan being waved past khaki-clad guards at a gate across a dirt road.
"Aleksandr, I was told that the aircraft would be on the ground here just long enough for the people from the Russian emba.s.sy to take the two crates from it," Garcia-Romero said.
"Hector, anything you have to tell anybody about this, you tell me," Castillo said. "Alek is not the tsar of this operation, I am."
Pevsner"s face whitened but he didn"t say anything.
"Are you going to tell me what "this operation" is all about, Carlos?" Garcia-Romero asked.
"Probably not. Who told you about the Tupolev coming and the involvement of the Russian emba.s.sy?"
Garcia-Romero hesitated before replying, then said, "Valentin Borzakovsky."
"Who"s he?"
Garcia-Romero hesitated again.
"He"s a businessman who lives in Venezuela."
"What kind of a businessman? FSB or drug cartel?"
"I don"t think I like the question, or your tone, Carlos," Garcia-Romero said.
"Probably both, Carlos," Nicolai Tarasov answered Castillo. "He"s one of the people we often fly out of here. And then back in here."
"With suitcases full of money?"
Tarasov nodded, smiled, and added, "On the way out. He always comes back empty-handed."
Monitor Fourteen now showed the cave. The Expeditions and the Mercedes were driving into it.
Then it showed the sky, the camera obviously looking for an aircraft.
Or cameras, plural, Castillo thought as the view which had shown some terrain changed to one showing only the sky.
How do they know to expect it?
He looked around the control room and found a radar screen.
I wouldn"t want to make an instrument landing using that, but that"s not what it"s intended for. That"s just to let the authorities of Drug Cartel International know that an aircraft has entered their area.
There was a blip on the radar screen.
I wonder how far away that airplane is. How far and how high.
Monitor Fourteen showed a dot in the sky that quickly grew into an airplane.
Castillo looked at Tarasov to see if he had seen it. Tarasov nodded.
Castillo went back to the screen. The airplane had now grown an enormous vertical stabilizer and engines above the fuselage.
Castillo looked at Tarasov again.
Tarasov nodded and mouthed, "Tu-934A."
That"s one weird-looking airplane. If I had ever seen one-even a picture of one-I would have remembered.
Monitor Fourteen showed the weird-looking airplane coming in low for a landing.
"I"d never seen an airplane like that before," Garcia-Romero said.
Well, the Russians certainly didn"t show it off at the Paris Air Show. That"s a Special Operations special.
That it exists can"t be kept a secret but the fewer people who know anything else about it, the better.
The landing roll looked normal, until all of a sudden it decelerated at an amazing rate until it was almost at a complete stop and then turned.
He must have spotted the cave.
Proof of that came when Monitor Fourteen showed the Tu-934A coming into the cave, and the camouflaged tarpaulin being lowered into place once the plane was inside.
The rear door of the Mercedes opened and a man in a business suit walked toward the Tu-934A.
The monitor pulled in on his face.
"Well, h.e.l.lo, Pavel," Tom Barlow said.
"Who is he?" Castillo asked.
"Pavel Koslov," Svetlana said. "The Mexico City rezident rezident."
"And that means this is important, and probably that there"s somebody notorious on the plane," Barlow said.
Monitor Fourteen showed the ramp at the rear of the Tu-934A"s fuselage lowering. Before it quite touched the ground, two men in rather tight, hooded black coveralls, their faces masked, and carrying Kalashnikov rifles, trotted down it and looked the area over.
One of them made a come on come on gesture and two more similarly dressed and armed men came down the ramp. gesture and two more similarly dressed and armed men came down the ramp.
"We call people who dress up like that "ninjas,"" Castillo said. "What do you call them, Sweaty?"
"Spetsnaz."
Another man, in the black coveralls but not wearing a mask, came down the ramp. The camera moved in for a close-up.
"And a very good afternoon to you, General," Barlow said. "I trust the general had a pleasant flight?"
"That"s General Yakov Vladimirovich Sirinov," Svetlana said. "Which tells us that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is indeed behind all this."